The how…

[…] We need regular high-impact media coverage of the findings of leading [global warming skeptic] scientists — not just one or two publications, but we need to have hundreds all over the world. We need to have a high degree of information sharing and cooperation between groups, so that when Vincent Gray for example has an article published in New Zealand, we can take the same piece and we can (say) submit it to newspapers all over North America and Europe.

Then we have a nicely well-coordinated response, where letters to the editor and phone calls are made. “Congratulations on publishing that article!” You know, it’s interesting because I’ve had many of my articles opposed so strongly, by environmentalists through phone calls and letters to the editor, that they just simply dry up, they just won’t publish us again. So this does have feedback, I mean, these are people that run these newspapers, and they’re scared, and impressed, and encouraged, depending on the feedback they get.

We have to have grassroots organizations doing exactly that kind of thing: coordinated local activism.

And finally, as I said, we need unbiased polling and good press coverage.

Nah, that won’t work well, because the editors will quickly get wind of what’s going on. And besides, if they also know that the ICSC is behind the propagation of the said news story in the first place, then it’ll be pure disaster! Of course, this means that the ICSC will have to hide the fact that it’s behind all the “grassroots activism”…

…and the why

The point of all these tactics, as helpfully highlighted on Slide 22 of Harris’s presentation,1 is partly to change people’s “perceptions of public opinion” on climate regulation. But whose perceptions? While Kevin Grandia thinks that the target of astroturfing is the man on the street, I’m more of the opinion that it’s targeted primarily at the decision makers. I commented on In It,

As Korzybski said, “the map is not the territory.” But the map is what the politician sees. And while you expend all your energy to conquer huge amounts of actual territory, someone else simply colours parts of the map as his own, and sends the map to the politician.

The territory is the actual public opinion, while the map is a politician’s perception of this public opinion.

And if a politician perceives lots of active opposition to climate regulation — even if the opposition’s artificially drummed up — he may be tempted to adjust his policy proposals according to ‘public opinion’. And this, I surmise, is what the ICSC is trying to accomplish.

Footnotes

Interestingly, while Harris emphasizes this point in the slides, he skips over it in his speech.

Updates

2008-08-15: I’ve now also uploaded the 2-minute segment (converted to Ogg Speex format) to Wikiality. Also, I adjusted the paragraphing in the above transcript to make it align better with the slide’s bullet points.

Hah, I’ll admit, it’s a conspiracy theory all right. :) But from Harris’s words it seems that the existence of the conspiracy is quite beyond doubt — so in that sense the theory’s quite parsimonious.

The only question is whether the conspiracy’s been as successful as envisioned. If we don’t hear very much from self-admitted ICSC activists, then it means either (1) it’s indeed quite successful; or (2) it’s been an abject failure, and the grassroots support of Gray et al. is real, or comes from other astroturfing efforts…

…and since the most frequent of the pseudonymice shows increasing resemblance to a particular in-towner (albeit surprisingly uninformed on a local matter), i’d better retract said generalization altogether…

[…] brief: the group of ‘experts’ are using the ICSC, which is nothing more than a mindless meme propagation shop, to make lots of noise. The “faculty” was comprised of Ph.D.s and area-specific experts from 14 […]